Carving Designs Onto the Face of A Large Squash

The large size carving sets that are available come with various cookie cutter type templates for carving designs onto the face of a pumpkin or calabash type squash. These metal shapes can be gently tapped into the face of the melon or squash used to a depth of about 1/4". This can be accomplished using the back of a large chef's knife or a light mallet of some sort. After the template is sunk into the vegetable one can begin to remove the "meat" of the vegetable around it. The picture above shows the result of using a double happiness template. Digging between the tighter parts of the design requires a little care and the use of the smaller knives and chisels included in the carving set but if the template is kept in place until the cutting is almost complete no real damage to the design is likely to happen.

This image shows yet another Asian design made using a template cutter from the larger carving set. These sets also contain a wonderful selection of "chisels" in many shapes and sizes allowing a limitless amount of creative freedom and experimentation. 

To accomplish a similar result without purchasing such a carving set a free hand design can be cut into the face of the vegetable and this can be carved simply with the paring knife and/or bird's beak knife recommended on the tools page. The image below depicts my first ever freehand design. You can see that one does not have to be an accomplished artist  to achieve decent results when doing this work. People see only the big picture when presented by a buffet and are not judging the details. This has been observed many times by myself when folks have been around the food table for quite some time and suddenly realize that the flowers in the centerpiece are not flowers at all but carved vegetables and even then they find it hard to believe that most of them are simply turnips!

In this image the "petals" of the flowers were made using a small melon ball cutter twisted around but not allowed to go too deep. Everything else was carved using the paring knife freehand. Other tools used in this image were a channel knife and one fluted chisel for the edging around the design.